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I saw your request in the other message and was equally puzzled with 珍字对脚 because I have never ever heard of these four Chinese characters being used together in this manner. I was going nowhere until I read your message which says "Tai & Co Canton" and I started laughing once I figured out their meaning.
You see, these four characters, IMHO, are not really Mandarian, but Cantonese, one of the many Chinese dialects that is being spoken in the Guangdong (Canton)province of China (including Hong Kong). I happen to speak both Mandarian and Cantonese.
You see the difficulties with many Chinese dialects such as Cantonese is that there are some words (or should I say characters) you can say them but there are no written words (or characters) for them, therefore one would have to use other characters that sound similar to these word and use them as the written words. That is like you may think you can read English but if somebody include a lot of local slang in their writing you would be totally lost with what they tried to say. If a Cantonese would write a Chinese essay in Cantonese (and not Mandarian), I I guarantee you that non-Cantonese would not be able to understand most of it. I myself some time had troubles understanding writing that were written in Cantonese until I translated each single character from Cantonese back to Mandarin because while I did speak Cantonese in Hong Kong everyday but learned to write in Mandarian in schools (that is for everybody). Simply put, I did not write what I spoke. For this reason, quite a few Cantonese in Hong Kong are poor in Chinese writing, just like many black people in USA who are not good in writing English because they speak Ebonics in their daily lives.
Another interesting fact is that Vietnamese which may be an ancient Chinese dialect and used to be written in Chinese characters was turned into a writing system of romanization by the French in the 17th century. If any ancient Vietnamese can return to today's Vietnam they would not be able to read a single modern written Vietnamese word.
The four characters on your table (from top to bottom)
珍字对脚
would probably be more appropriate to pronounce as
因住对脚
脚 - here means leg (or legs)
对 - can mean correct or accurate if using as an adjective, but it was used as a noun here which means a pair (or a set);
珍字 should be more appropriately written as 因住 which means Be careful (*To make it more complicated, there are a lot of different villages/towns in the Quangdong province and the official language for those who reside in the Guangdong city would indeed be Cantonese but everybody who originated from different parts of Quangdong would speak their own dialects, with some which are very close to Cantonese but with some that can be quite different, almost like an accent).
Therefore together, I believe the four characters, if indeed were written in Cantonese would mean:
Be careful of the pair (or set) of legs (of the table).
It is possible that they were the instruction for the one who would assemble the table; or for the one who would transport it or for the one who would use it (are the legs kind of wobbling?).
Hope this helps and thanks for offering me a challenging translation puzzle.
Super
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